detail information

Designing and writing Label (Data-side):

For the data side tests, we will use an ordinary DVD-R media.

Label only:

We will now design our label for use on the data side of the disc. We will keep the design simple since this is the data side of the disc.

As before, the label editor opens with a blank label ready for us to add our own text and graphics.

From the screenshot above we can see we added some simple graphics and text to our design.

For our first test we selected the 'highest" quality setting, and then clicked on 'Burn" to start the label burning process.

A warning then popped up telling us if we proceeded we would not be able to burn any further data to our disc.

With the highest quality selected the burn process took 23 minutes and 52 seconds to complete. Below we can see the resulting image:

Highest quality

To the naked eye the result is excellent, and as we can see from our scanned image, both the text and graphics are easy to read.

We then ran the test again this time selecting 'medium" quality. The results can be found below.

This time the burn process completed in 16 minutes and 5 seconds.

Medium quality

Once again the result is good. To the naked eye the disc has less contrast than the disc burned at the 'highest" quality.

We once again run the test, this time selecting the 'Fast" option.

As we can see the burn process completed in 6 minutes and 10 seconds. But now let's take a look at the result.

Fast

To the naked eye and our scanned image, we can see the contrast and resulting quality is not as good as the 'medium" or 'highest" quality settings, but as we can see, the 'Fast" option still produced a good result.

DATA and label:

For this test we combine both data and a label on the data side of the disc.

We first burned 1.9 gigabyte of data to our DVD-R media using Nero Burning Rom.

Once the data burning had completed we opened our label editor once more.

Once we opened our editor, we can see we have a blank label. This time however, we can see that Nero has detected there is already data on the disc, and only the empty part is available for writing our label.

We quickly designed a simple text message for our test.

Now it was time to burn our text message to our disc. We chose 'Highest" quality.

Because the area to be burned was much smaller this time, the burn process completed much faster. And as we can see, the entire process completed in 7 minutes and 39 seconds. We can see the result below.

To the naked eye the result is excellent, and from our scanned image we can see the text message is clearly visible and easy to read.

Read back test:

For a final test on the data side of the disc, we decided to test if our combined data and label disc could be read back on a non Labelflash™ drive.

For this test we used the NEC ND-3540A drive and Nero CD-DVD Speed to read back our disc.

As we can see, the drive had no problem in reading back our combined data and label disc.

EDITORS NOTE: In Nero Burning ROM version 6.6.1.4 the label feature on the data-side is now called DiscT@2™ (DiscTattoo) - see below:

Before we round off this review, let us run the drive through some advanced tests at next page…